Who wrote this

I work on energy and technology at the U.S. Department of Energy as a Presidential Innovation Fellow, and I teach at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. The work is a place where a fluent sentence and a real record are not the same object, and where looking something up is not the same as filing it. That difference is what these notes are for.

Each lesson has two versions: small words, and the terms you will see elsewhere. The small-words version is how I check the idea is actually in hand. It is a method, not a claim about the reader's age.

I was born in the Deep South and raised in Japan. I come from a military family and enlisted in the Air Force at seventeen. My work since then has moved through aerospace, law, health systems, and public service. A question I keep coming back to is how a person stays effective as life gets larger and more complicated. I read a lot. I write when I have thought something through.

Away from the desk I hike, visit parks, travel, cook, lift, and sit still when I can. Those habits, plus a bookshelf, live on my writing site.

• Hiking
• Parks
• Travel
• Yoga
• Sushi
• Cars
• Wine
• Board games

This is personal writing. It is not an official government publication.